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'Candy Crush Saga' Maker Files For IPO

Brett Molina
9:57 a.m. EST February 18, 2014

The creator of the hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga, King.com, has filed papers to become a publicly traded company.

A man plays at Candy Crush Saga on his Iphone on January 25, 2014 in Rome. Candy Crush is one of the top online games developped by King.com. AFP PHOTO / GABRIEL BOUYS (Photo credit should read GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images)(Photo: GABRIEL BOUYS AFP/Getty Images)

The creator of the hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga has filed papers to become a publicly traded company.

Game company King.com filed its F1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday for an initial public offering. The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "KING." The company did not disclose the stock's IPO price. Banks JP Morgan, Credit Suisse Securities and BofA Merrill Lynch will lead the offering.

The company will attempt to raise as much as $500 million for the IPO.

According to its IPO filing, King boasted an average of 128 million daily active users last month who played their games more than 1.2 billion times a day. The smash hitCandy Crush Saga, which first launched on Facebook before surging in popularity on mobile devices, makes up a significant portion of those numbers. The game has 93 million daily active users who played 1 billion times a day.

However, that one game has proven to be highly lucrative for King. According to financial information shared in their IPO filing, the company pulled in $568 million in profit off of $1.9 billion in total revenue last year. In 2012, the year Candy Crush Sagawas introduced, King generated $164 million in revenue and $7.8 million in profit.

"We believe we have a repeatable and scalable game development process that is unparalleled in our industry," said King in its filing.

The IPO filing is the latest in a string of high-profile public tech offerings. Last November, social network Twitter began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $26 a share. Its stock has jumped above $57 as of pre-market trading Tuesday.

As with many social stocks such as Twitter and Facebook, King's mobile growth will likely be a key figure watched by investors. King says during the fourth quarter of 2013, 73% of their "gross bookings" came from mobile.